food

Vegetarian mini-rant

Vegetarian mini-rant:

Somehow the moment you say you’re not eating meat people thrust a salad at you.  Not an eggplant or mushrooms or broccoli or pulses or grains or rice or pasta or rutabaga.  A salad.  A big pile of lettuce with some oil and vinegar on it.

[That is because most people only think of meat, fowl, and maybe fish as “eating”. There’s no belief that you could be satiated without it, and little thought given to whatever else is being served.]
Source: Sasha Dichter’s Blog

On the Impracticality of a Cheeseburger

On the Impracticality of a Cheeseburger:

Waldo Jaquith:

A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed,
post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a
handful of vendors — in all likelihood, a couple of dozen — and
the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them
fresh. The cheeseburger couldn’t have existed until nearly a
century ago as, indeed, it did not.

Love the Sagan quote at the end.

[While an interesting thought experiment it doesn’t ring entirely true. Sure there can be problems with the seasonality of vegetables, but cheese making would have been a continual pursuit for those who did it. And while animal rennet is certainly most common, there are vegetable used rennets as well. etc. etc. The truth seems closer to “it takes a village” than do it all yourself. Maybe you hot house something, trade for some cheese, and no doubt, pre-freezer slaughtering a cow or a sheep would require multiple families because a single (unless very large) family couldn’t eat the animal fast enough… I try and enjoy each season for what it brings in all senses. The weather, the food, the holidays. So I think the effort to completely raise the entire meal from the ground is cool, much as planting trees to turn into furniture later is cool. But that path is long, and life is fleeting.]
Source: Daring Fireball

Why the Keurig K-Cup is the beginning of the end for great coffee « Muddy Dog Roasting Co.

Why the Keurig K-Cup is the beginning of the end for great coffee « Muddy Dog Roasting Co.: Do you think that vision is crazy?  Let’s see.  How easy is it to buy a Walla Walla onion?  Never heard of it?  I’m not surprised.  I grew up with them, but they’re already a thing of the past.  Hundreds of vegetable varieties have already gone extinct, solely due to our desire to homogenize, to have crops that ship well, regardless of how they taste.  Only 5% of US apple varieties that existed just 200 years ago still exist today.   Ninety percent of vegetable varieties have gone extinct over the last 100 years in the UK. The crimson flowered broad bean, the Champion of England Pea, the Bath Cos Lettuce, and the Rowsham Park Hero Onion are just a few examples of vegetables that are lost forever.  Hundreds of heirloom vegetable varieties are on the brink of extinction.  And there are all kinds of other foods that are falling victim to this same phenomenon. Try to buy a really great charcuterie today – Boar’s Head is as close as you’ll get in most places.  A beautiful creme fraiche?   How about Yoplait?  Great cheeses?  We got your Kraft, RIGHT HERE.  Don’t believe me? Go check out Slow Food’s Ark of Taste.  Oh, what’s that, you would like to have a nice meal at a cute bistro?  Sorry, all that’s available now are chain stores like Panera, TGI Friday’s or Appleby’s.  But you can probably score some Jack Daniels chicken wings, or some other ill-advised mess.  I can sum it all up in one word: Monsanto.

[And while Jim of Muddy Dog Roasting Company explains from his perspective. I think this particular paragraph worries me more (I’m not a coffee drinker) in that it is part of a larger problem, which expressed perfectly above. And in case it isn’t obvious the lost biodiversity is not just a loss of taste and experience. That’s bad enough. But it has become entirely clear that eating different foods is healthy for you, and having variations of each food makes that easier (you eat a tomato, but it’s a different tomato). The varying balances of the “ingredients” of a fruit or vegetable is a fundamental goodness. And the craft of growing and preparing food, where the results are not consistent at the “Monsanto” level and don’t try to be is also a fundamental goodness. It’s the same thing that is appealing about anything hand made. Sure, a dreadnaught style guitar has certain fundamental qualities. But each one is different. Hand build a bicycle and each one will have some personality even if you use the same measurements and tube set. That variation is good for us. And we need to be extremely careful that we don’t lose it in a chase to the bottom in the name of efficiency and money.]
Source: Marco Arment

Black Turtleneck Cocktail

Black Turtleneck Cocktail:

  • 1 oz. sweet vermouth (Dolin)
  • 1 oz. Applejack
  • 1 oz. rye whiskey (Rittenhouse Bonded)
  • ½ tsp. amber or dark organic agave nectar
  • 1 dash Fee’s Old Fashioned Bitters

Stir with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a Luxardo maraschino cherry or an organic cocktail cherry. Turn to face Cupertino and raise your glass.

(Yes, it’s a variant on a Manhattan. Yes, I’m having one right now. Yes, this is sincere. We mourn in our own ways.)

[Heh.]
Source: Coyote Tracks

Interview: Fast Boy Cycles

Interview: Fast Boy Cycles: I danced professionally for a few years, and then taught for almost ten. For a lot of that time I had a company and was making work. I went to art school (university of the arts in Philadelphia). I thought I was going to study industrial design. I was pretty disenchanted when I realized that the industrial designers weren’t that involved in the engineering side of making stuff (or really the MAKING side of making stuff). Mostly just how it looked. How it felt. So there was a lot of CAD work, and some molding of models out of plastic. Someone dared me to take a dance class one night. I did. It seemed like much more fun than the visual arts core classes I was taking, so I switched majors the next day (“you want to switch majors!?” “Yes, if that’s possible.” “have you ever danced before!!?” “Yeah… I took a class last night.”). I stopped to catch my breath almost 15 years later and realized that I sort of hated dance. When I finally ran away screaming, building bikes seemed like a safe harbor. Can’t remember how I connected THOSE dots. [Go read the whole thing. Ezra Caldwell takes great photos, builds beautiful bikes, and continues to beat cancer. In a world where “awesome” is overused…]
Source: Cycle EXIF Update

Yummy Autumn Treat

Toss the pumpkin seeds with cardamom, and cocoa nibs, then drizzle them with honey. Place them close together in a single layer on a cookie sheet and bake in the oven for 5 – 7 minutes. Remove and let cool completely.

Try not to eat too much.

1/3 cup pumpkin seeds
1/4 tsp. cardamom
2 tbsp. honey
1/4 cup cocoa nibs

This year’s favorite things

In the tech category, Rails 2.3, Redis, and the Engine Yard Cloud. offerings have got to top the list of things that improved our ability to deliver products and simplified solutions for us. Github also tops my list of services that have become a way of life. The tech world spins quickly though. Curious to see what’s next. In all cases though, it’s not the tech or the code but the people. All these projects or companies have seriously dedicated people working on them. *That* is what makes these things go. Rock on people.

Quoc Pham fixed shoes
Rapha scarf, Patagonia Nano Puff Pullover
Outlier Black Empire Tee
Stormy Kromer shirt
Rapha Lightweight Softshell
Panache Cycling Houndtooth socks
Outlier hoodie
dogfishhead 90 minute IPA
jeff jones silver headbadge
hed ardennes
king cages ti water bottle cages
harriman local loop
Chris King ISO Hubs
Starting line with Team Fatty at the Livestrong Challenge Philly
Fall riding rocks
Mad Alchemy Mango Love
Taza Chocolate Mexicana helping the dev team persevere
Laying down some fresh tracks in the snow

There might be a few more… time will tell.

Bluepoint Brewing Oatmeal Stout

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Not long ago, my friend Evan decided I (and the team) needed to taste some Bluepoint Blueberry. Of course, he brought other varieties when the time came (we try and taste four varieties in order to get some sense of the brewery as a whole and not just a single flavor or batch) he brought a growler of Oatmeal Stout. I do enjoy a stout. Seemingly almost any stout.

This one however was particularly smooth and rich. Seriously. No… seriously! Sure it was helped by the lack of preservatives that bottled beer contains, but even so, this was wonderfully balanced.

There was a bit leftover when all was said and done, so I cooked it down with some roasted onions and placed it on a number of different vegetable sandwiches. This classic recipe for brats works really well for all sorts of things, I find if you;re not using it with a meet product that sour things and spicey things help to balance the sweetness of the onions and stout. So an eggplant wrap with chipotle, tomato, and the onions is awesome. You can also add some Tahina to the onions to further thicken, and balance some bitterness against the sweetness. (and blend if you’re using it as a dressing or spread). The Bluepoint Oatmeal Stout worked exceptionally well for all these cases as well.

In a couple of weeks we’ll be using a similar recipe, but we’ll be cooking outside over hickory and oak. You can in fact smell the yumminess.

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The onions here are about midway through the thickening process…

Autumn

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We have few “we-started-them” family traditions. Family traditions abound on both sides, but there are few we feel are our own. Apple/Pumpkin picking is one. Even that is fairly hazy in that everyone else has done it as well, but we try and do it every year which apparently counts for something somewhere, in some ledger of family tradition, or so I’m told, and leave me alone already etc.

Fruit off a tree is magical. It’s not from a bin in a store. It’s not handled by others. It’s not processed, folded, spindled, or mutilated as the post office is want to say. One second it’s part of tree and the next second it’s a snack, or a pie, or the promise of one. Magic I tell you.
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Noah agrees.